books
The
Ice Storm author and
Dale Peck nemesis says, "After 9/11, I really wanted to deal with the culture as a whole instead of just navel-gazing." Moody calls his 1992 book
Garden State (no relation to the Natalie Portman/Zach Braff film) "a truly dreadful book but it's emotionally accessible and vulnerable and I admire that." Re: drinking? He's recovered now: "There wasn't some halcyon period where I could have one or two drinks and be witty at a party. I'd have six or eight more and try to f—- other people's girlfriends." [
Sydney Morning Herald]
censored
Rick Moody's
Black Veil is a pretty standard nonfiction novel memoir travel book literary critical recovery tome. (Yes, that's his description. More interesting than the
Ice Storm author's struggle with alcohol: what he didn't publish). A description of a trip to a tranny bar didn't make it past the publishers. Don't worry: Moody, the envy of his peers after two books were made into movies, has posted the deleted account to the
Five Chapters website. The author's preamble: "I asked a writer friend who is an expert on the subject if he would take me to a tranny bar in New York City, and off we went," he says. (Yes, that's what they all say!) "I really liked this passage, still do, but I think my publishers were genuinely uncomfortable about it, as if it suggested a genuine inner disturbance of some kind." The girls, and their residuary knobs, after the jump.
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michiko kakutani
So, surprise of surprises, this week's
Time Out has a fairly interesting feature in which New York's professional critics are judged by a panel of experts. There aren't many shocks (
The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones and Alex Ross are great music critics, Frank Bruni is inferior to his $25-and-Under colleague Peter Meehan, something about dance, etc.) but the gloves really come off when
Times book critic
Michiko Kakutani gets reviewed.
"Reactionary, mean-spirited. Has a permanent grudge against experiment, playfulness, subversion, perversity and complexity. Her reviews are predictable, dull, ugly, conservative, mocking and trite."
Well, it's not an uncommon opinion. And she
can be a little mean-spirited at times.
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Gawker
